Promoting Search Engines

This page lists articles from Search Engine Watch and around the web about how search engines have advertised or promoted themselves to the public.

NOTE: Article links often change, especially the older an article is. In case of a bad link, use the publication's search facility, which most have, and search for the headline. Also, some very old articles flagged "no longer online" might indeed be online -- but the former URL no longer resolves, and it's not worth the time investment for me to try and personally track down these down versus spending time producing new content.

Yahoo's running ads on Google to drive traffic to its shopping area. It's not the first time a search engine has advertised on another one. Indeed, Yahoo's currently running a major campaign in Europe on Google and Espotting to promote some of its portal features.

It's a new era of search engine advertising -- that is, advertising by the search engines themselves. Ask Jeeves, Overture and HotBot are all making moves to get the word out about themselves. Note the statement that Google "hardly advertises at all." True, in terms of search consumers. But Google does indeed spend on advertising and marketing itself to potential advertisers, just as Overture does.

Northern Light, now defunct, was the last search engine to run search-specific television ads back in 2000. Now search returns to TV as part of a new advertising campaign to be run by Yahoo. Ads are coming to billboards and the internet, also.

Following on its redesign, Ask Jeeves is now pondering an advertising campaign to attract users. Such campaigns have never seemed to have built long-term usage in the past, but what the heck, the money is apparently flowing. At least the idea of expensive television advertising appears to have been ruled out while online is being strongly considered. That's probably a good move. The one search engine I always felt did a good job in building users was Overture, back when it was originally the GoTo.com destination site. Shortly after its launch, GoTo banners were everywhere -- and traffic did rise.

Miss the "good old days," when some search engines spent absurd amounts of money advertising themselves? Well, you might think they've returned, now that Ask Jeeves has decided to run ads to promote its site. But wait -- we have a plan, says Ask Jeeves. It's not expensive TV ads but instead billboards, signage and other types of promotion targeted specifically in LA and New York. Overview of where and how advertising is being done.

Earlier this year, when talking to people at conference near an exhibitor booth, one of the people over my shoulder seemed eerily familiar. Who was this guy? Why did I know him so well? Finally, it hit me -- I was in front of the Ask Jeeves booth, and the guy was Jeeves himself! This article provides a closer look at one of the 50 different people to portray Jeeves at technology events.

Another older article but with interesting statistics showing how much portals spend on advertising in relation to the advertising revenue they receive. At the top of the list, MSN was estimated to spend US $1.62 for every $1 earned. In contrast, Yahoo and some other portals spent only 10 cents per dollar earned. E-commerce and other revenues were not taken into account, only pure advertising revenue.

Northern Light has launched its second television ad campaign, in hopes of raising awareness of the service. The first campaign last fall failed to bring the service anywhere close to the traffic levels of its competitors, as this article details.

Both AltaVista and Northern Light are planning television campaigns. All the search engines that have done this in the past have enjoyed real gains, so it's a wise move for both companies. In fact, AltaVista already enjoys such heavy grassroots traffic that an TV campaign could push it into seriously rivaling Excite, Go or Lycos for traffic. As for Northern Light, this will probably be what finally puts it on the radar screen before the general public.

I've been meaning to mention this change at Lycos that happened some months ago, in the context of the Company Names Test that I run from time-to-time. Basically, Lycos is popping up special pages if you enter "Yahoo" or "Excite." The pages are a bit heavy-handed -- they make a pitch for sticking with Lycos, instead of going to the competing site. But they do provide a link at the bottom to the service that users are after -- which is more helpful than what some search engines were providing, the last time I ran the test. But do a search for "Infoseek" at Lycos, and you'll see what would really benefit users more -- a big link that says "Infoseek's home page" at the top of the results.